ABSTRACT
Images and visuals enter our lives in many different forms and through various events and occasions. As we walk down the street of a new city, we navigate our way through an assortment of visual practices and objects (e.g., maps, signs, people giving directions, colored lines, etc.). Each day we are bombarded with images relating to our everyday lives such as our health (e.g., x-rays, scans, no smoking signs, graphs and images linking heart disease, obesity, what we eat, and life expectancy). Within the workplace we therefore engage in many different practices of imagining on a daily basis. A moment of reflection can produce a long list of examples of organizations relying extensively upon a myriad of images and pictorial representations such as budgets, schedules, reports, graphs, organizational charts, project models, scans, surveillance, plans, visual standards, to name but a few. Managing and organizing can involve making sense of abstract slogans and planning future strategies with the aid of diagrams and planning devices; accounting relies heavily on written numeric records, tables, graphs and accounts; and health care involves the assemblage of a vast array of forms, assessments, scans, medical reports and interventions. Organizations thus endure through, and thanks to, these many various visual representations and their related practices. In other words, forms, images, visualizations and assemblages of all kinds underlie the process of organizing, a process by which organizations are constantly made and re-made.
